Summary of deposit

This deposit consists of audio recordings and written texts in/about Kubokota, spoken on Ranongga Island, Solomon Islands, resulting from fieldwork conducted between September 2006 and June 2007.

Group represented

Kubokota, Ranongga Island, Solomon Islands

Language information

Kubokota (also known as Ganoqa or Ghanongga); Luqa (Lungga)

Deposit contents

The deposit comprises over 150 audio files, as well as written texts, elicitation materials and participant observation notes.

Genres include traditional narratives, procedural and route descriptions, personal stories and accounts of everyday events in which the researcher participated. Elicited materials include responses to the caused positions and cut and break video stimuli, frog stories, and men-and-tree games, which were used in the researcher’s doctoral investigation into the Kubokota directional system.

Other information

Kubokota, an Austronesian language of the North West Solomonic branch of Western Oceanic, is spoken in the Solomon Islands by around 2500 speakers. The language is endangered due to increasing pressure from English and Solomon Islands Pijin; at present, however, most children still learn the language as their mother tongue, and speakers are keen to raise the prestige of the language by introducing vernacular education at kindergarten level, and by other initiatives such as publication of Kubokota texts and a dictionary of tree terminology.

The deposit also includes some material from Luqa, a closely related neighbouring language. In total, 50 speakers aged between 12 and 80 were recorded for the deposit.

Acknowledgement

Users are requested to acknowledge the depositor, Mary Chambers, when citing resources from this deposit.